How this McCourt Alumna is Helping Revive Local Journalism in Her Hometown

Long before Erin Schrimpf (MPP’16) began hosting a morning newscast for the Jefferson City News Tribune, she served as a press aide and speechwriter for the mayor of Kansas City, where she saw firsthand how policy decisions shape communities.

As she looked ahead in her career, Schrimpf knew she wanted to deepen her understanding of policy and build the analytical foundation to back up her communications instincts, and an MPP degree, she decided, would fill that gap. She considered two programs and nearly chose a school closer to her hometown, but visiting Georgetown changed her mind.

“I’d been to Washington, DC, for work before, but I’d never spent much time on the Georgetown campus,” says Schrimpf. “Meeting the faculty and talking to students just changed my mind.”

Connecting public affairs and public policy

At McCourt, Schrimpf honed her quantitative analysis skills, which deepened her ability to make complex policy accessible. “McCourt really formalized for me where I sit at the Venn diagram of quantitative skills, storytelling and communications,” she says. “I was moving in that direction before, but I was missing the quantitative piece.“ 

At McCourt, Schrimpf served as editor-in-chief of Georgetown’s Public Policy Review, helping shape the journal’s vision and tone, while also sharpening her ability to translate the impacts of complex public policy.

Upon graduation, Schrimpf was selected to serve as a Presidential Management Fellow (PMF), a two-year leadership development program administered by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. As a PMF in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, she served in multiple roles, including as a speechwriter for the agency’s most senior officials.

“At the core of everything I’ve done, whether it be political campaigns or speech writing,  I’ve always felt like I sit at the intersection of translating complex policy issues and explaining them in everyday terms,” Schrimpf says. “I find the quantitative side of public policy fascinating, but I know there are people who can do it better. I’d rather talk to them, understand their ideas and translate them. That’s where I’ve found myself, and that’s always been the most fun.”

Combining policy, public affairs and local journalism

After a few years in Washington, DC, Schrimpf returned to her home state, Missouri, during the 2018 election cycle, where she served as spokesperson and communications director for several statewide ballot campaigns. This experience exposed her to private sector consulting and public affairs, eventually inspiring her to found her own political consulting company, Schrimpf Strategies. 

Through this work, Schrimpf saw up close a rapidly changing local media landscape. “Over the years, I watched local papers get bought up by private equity,” says Schrimpf. “Newsrooms hollowed out.”

At the same time, as Schrimpf was building her public affairs career, she started co-hosting a political talk show, “This Week in Missouri Politics,” with friend and colleague Scott Faughn. So, when the Jefferson City News Tribune was brought back under local ownership by Faughn, he offered her the opportunity to host a daily newscast covering Jefferson City.  It was, as Schrimpf describes it, a “full-circle” moment.

“I don’t know that opportunities like this come knocking twice, so I went for it,” she says.

Schrimpf’s goal as the daily broadcast host is to restore the paper’s local legacy and focus on the issues that matter to the community.

Her coverage centers on three policy areas she believes will define mid-Missouri over the next decade. The first is the state budget — particularly relevant in Jefferson City, where a large percentage of the city’s workforce are state employees. 

The second is healthcare, particularly the University of Missouri’s expanding role in regional medicine at a time when rural hospitals across the state are closing. The third is agriculture, where commodity prices, trade policy and the rapid conversion of farmland for data centers create consequences that ripple through every corner of the local economy.

None of it, she’s careful to note, gets framed as a partisan issue. Schrimpf is deliberate about keeping the focus on impact over ideology — wary of reducing complex, slow-moving trends to a Democrat versus Republican frame. 

“I try to translate it to ‘this is what’s happening down the road from you,'” she says. “I let the voices in our community lead.”

It’s an approach that traces back directly to her time at McCourt — a place she credits with giving her the framework to bridge the world of policy institutions and the communities those policies actually touch.

“McCourt gave me the foundation to figure out how things discussed in institutions like Georgetown actually translate to real people,” she says. “Without that piece, I don’t think I’d be as good at it.”

Schrimpf describes how McCourt gave her more than analytical skills, empowering her to develop a framework for making those skills mean something to real people. Now, back in the community where she grew up, she’s doing exactly that — one broadcast at a time.